Wall Street Journal flaunts its support for dictatorship

The laying bare of the real nature of American operations makes the political and media establishment anxious. 

19 February 2011 [print_link]

The ongoing tumultuous events in the Middle East and North Africa have further exposed the claim that the US government has an interest in democracy anywhere in the world. Outraged populations have risen up against one brutal regime after another that has been armed, financed and maintained by Washington—Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and beyond.

The goal of American foreign policy, more clearly revealed than ever, is to defend the wealth and strategic interests of the US corporate-financial oligarchy.

This has not been lost on great numbers of people, in the US and elsewhere. The laying bare of the real nature of American operations makes the political and media establishment anxious. For various historical reasons, US imperialism has previously dressed up its predatory operations in the guise of bringing “freedom and democracy” to various peoples. As Trotsky remarked derisively in 1924, “America is always liberating somebody, that’s her profession.” (After all, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and “Operation Enduring Freedom” are the official names used by the US governments for its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively.)

Only someone not right in the head, however, could pretend that supporting dictators like a Ben Ali (Tunisia), a Mubarak (Egypt), or a Saleh (Yemen) is a liberating act. These figures have presided for decades over regimes that routinely arrest, sadistically abuse and murder political opponents, suppress workers in the interest of foreign and domestic corporations, and generally terrorize their populations, while engorging themselves, their families and cronies with riches.

The editors of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal have therefore felt it necessary to come to the defense of the dictatorships propped up by Washington. In an editorial February 16 (“Egypt and Iran”), the Journal uses the occasion of police repression by the Iranian regime to make the case for US-backed dictators.

This is a grotesque lie. The Journal chooses to forget that Mubarak and Egypt’s military lived by and through violence, with the full backing of “the West,” for three decades. Far from pressuring the Egyptian government to “shun violence,” Washington enlisted Egyptian officials to torture US-held prisoners as part of Washington’s rendition program in the “war on terror.”

We will spare the reader descriptions of the barbaric methods of torture employed by the Egyptian state against its real and imagined enemies. Its prisons, by all accounts, rang with screams. The regime killed thousands and imprisoned tens of thousands, at a conservative estimate.

In the last days of Mubarak’s rule alone, the military “secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents … and at least some of these detainees have been tortured,” according to human rights activists cited by the Guardian on February 9.

Nonetheless, the Journal continues shamelessly, “To put it another way, pro-American dictatorships have more moral scruples.”

The implicit claim that the Egyptian army is refraining from a crackdown on popular protests and strikes due to its “moral scruples” is absurd. If it has so far abstained from drowning popular resistance in blood, it is because it faces a millions-strong mass movement and dares not pursue such a policy.

The generals in Cairo and their overlords in Washington fear that, with such an assault, they might provoke a revolutionary response. The military is therefore biding its time, preparing its forces, hoping that official and petty-bourgeois “opposition” forces will demobilize popular protests and allow them to re-establish control of the situation.

The timing of the Journal’s article was unfortunate, however. Within 24 hours of the editorial’s appearance, one of those “scrupulous,” pro-American dictatorships in Bahrain, an island nation whose people lives in the shadow of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, launched a lethal assault on protesters gathered in the capital city’s central square.

Officially, five were killed, although 60 are missing, and some 250 people injured, by batons, rubber bullets and pellets fired from shotguns. The security forces attacked sleeping men, women and children without mercy, beating some of them to death. The savagery of the attack outraged the population, prompting huge funeral processions on Friday. Again, crowds were fired on and many wounded, by the American-trained army this time.

Bahrain is considered critical by the US for a number of geopolitical reasons, and it appears that even the crocodile tears shed by Barack Obama over repression in Egypt will not be spilled in this case. As one commentator noted, “As far as Washington is concerned, this small Persian Gulf kingdom may be where support for Middle East democracy dies.”

In any event, the US government over the decades has cooperated with and backed the most horrific regimes on earth, from Franco’s Spain and apartheid South Africa, and governments run by butchers in military uniform in Central and South America, to semi-feudal monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and the rule of mass murderers in Indonesia. American foreign policy has, in fact, sailed upon an ocean of blood and human misery.

The Journal editorial’s hostile comments about the Iranian regime are not driven by any affection for democracy. The editors are sympathetic to Iran’s Green Movement because the latter is a right-wing trend, with strongest support in middle class layers, which criticizes the Ahmadinejad government for not going far enough along the lines of International Monetary Fund-inspired “free market reforms.” A Mousavi-Karroubi regime in Iran would still be a dictatorship, but it would be precisely a “pro-American” dictatorship.

If, however, one were to set aside the Journal’s self-serving claims about Iran, what is one to make of the fact that a leading American publication openly makes the case for supporting dictatorship?

In this the Journal speaks, although perhaps more brazenly and openly than some, for the American ruling elite as a whole. The editors of the New York Times would not disagree, although they might approach the matter somewhat more gingerly … and underhandedly. The Obama administration proceeds in a similar fashion, cynically registering its “alarm” and “deep concern” about each successive atrocity carried out by its dictatorial client states.

The chatter of the Journal’s editors about “moral scruples” is just that. The Wall Street Journal appraises a given foreign government according to the most cynical Realpolitik: does it assist or stand in the way of American global interests? After the fact, the newspaper finds virtues and “moral scruples” in those governments that do—or rather, their supposed virtue lies precisely in their subservience to US strategic aims.

Bill Moyers: America Can't Deal With Reality — We Must Be Exposed to the Truth, Even If It Hurts

By Bill Moyers

Posted on February 15, 2011
[print_link]
Crossposted with http://www.alternet.org/story/149925/

History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcasting. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2011, in New York City.

I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spent time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfalea. He’s the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko’s in a former hamburger stand with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service empire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko’s, Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you do. He described to me how he teaches history “backwards” to college students who have learned little about the past in high school, don’t know that the past is even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He hands his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to begin with the “now” of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology to trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today’s news. Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind Ariadne’s thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the story. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generations, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the time zones of human experience.

I also had the privilege of witnessing Fred in action. When he was president of “CBS News” and I was the White House press secretary, he would come down from New York on the shuttle and slip in the back door of the White House and along the hall past the Cabinet Room to the private entrance to my office for an hour-or-so chat. I had done some preliminary work at the Office of Education on the future of public television in 1964, and we were soon talking about the medium’s future; he was a true believer in television “that dignifies instead of debases” and of the importance “of at least one channel free of commercials and commercial values.” Little did we know at the time that he would soon quit the job he relished as president of the news division that he and Edward R. Murrow had built. The two of them created “See It Now” and “CBS Reports,” which set the standard for investigative reporting and documentaries of unprecedented power and impact. One of their collaborations was the famous documentary on the demagogic and dangerous Senator Joseph McCarthy. They made the brilliant decision to let McCarthy speak for himself, an entire broadcast’s worth of his bullying words and techniques. McCarthy obligingly hanged himself on national television, far more effectively and fatally than anyone else’s words could. His own words had turned Americans against his demagoguery – something for which the right to this day has never forgiven what they denounced as the “Communist Broadcasting System.” Watching that documentary over and again, I realized that it is through such unhurried honoring of reality that we can approach the myriad and messy truths of human experience. For lasting effect, those truths cannot be forced into the mind of the public; they must be nurtured.

Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency “deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information.” He was reporting on research at the University of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts were not curing misinformation. “Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.” You can read the entire article online.

Robert Parry has written, “the truthers” threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right’s sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the “truthers” cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside-job” story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.

George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that “like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket,” this kind of propaganda engenders a “protective stupidity” almost impossible for facts to penetrate.

Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual broadcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned this early on.

When I collaborated with the producer Sherry Jones on the very first documentary ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees, we unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listing campaign contributions to every member of Congress. The broadcast infuriated just about everyone, including old friends of mine who a few years earlier had been allies when I worked at the White House. Congressmen friendly to public television were also outraged, but, I am pleased to report, PBS took the heat without melting.

There are other uses of the disclosures from WikiLeaks admirably compiled by Greg Mitchell in the current edition of The Nation, where the one-time editor of Editor and Publisher performed an important public service by culling the gold from the dust.

Yes! magazine just two days ago:

The rules that the FCC passed in December are vague and weak. The limited protections that were placed on wired connections, the kind you access through your home computer, leave the door open for the phone and cable companies to develop fast and slow lanes on the Web and to favor their own content or applications.

The Internet fight for democracy is a public fight. Come on in!

Bill Moyers is the host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.




Confessions of a Damned Elitist

WBy Diane G

[print_link]
Sat Feb 12, 2011 at 15:21:51 PM EST
First off, let me assure you that does not mean I am one of Society’s “Elites.”
ELITE: In sociology as in general usage, the elite is a group of relatively small size, that is dominant within a large society, having a privileged status perceived as being envied by others of a lower line of order.
Me.
If anyone is going to address my Elitism, it may as well be me.
It is utterly exhausting to have people so close to the finish line, but refusing to take that leap of logic and cross over. Its ok to point out the obvious treachery of the right, but taboo in many circles to point out the equal treachery of the so-called left representing us in this Country.
Obama has done more to split the Left in this Country than a thousand Fox New Liars could.
He has divided us into ideologues who cling to a dream, and realists who have discovered partisan politics is a sham.
Bit by bit? The circle grows smaller. For every new connection I seem to make with a kindred, an old one falls away. Its lonely on the fringe. Its hard to be an outsider, an Elitist. Its so much easier to just quit talking, and fit in. But Elitist I remain.
  • I resent the hell out of the fact that ignorance is prized in this country, intelligence dismissed as egg-headed nerdishness, that pile-ons of the celebrity-fail de jour trumps real politic, and that group-think surpasses reasoned individual opinion.
  • I reject partisan politics as an utter sham. Any Candidate that makes it even close to the public has been vetted, and stamped with the seal of Korporate Kleptocracy approval.
  • I am for Nationalizing every Major Company in the Country.
  • I am for Direct Democracy, not Representative Democracy. Representative Democracy sets a Small Group above and apart, and smaller numbers are more easily corrupted.
  • All Education, including the Highest Levels should be Free and Unrestricted, with absolutely no Religious influence whatsoever.
  • I am for dismantling the Military entirely, and removing every US presence in bases from Foreign Lands.
  • I reject Fossil Fuel usage, and think only Green Renewable Energy should be used.
  • I think Pollution of any type should be illegal.
  • I reject Capitalism in any or all of its forms.
  • I believe in dismantling Puritanical norms that defile sex as evil, and promote violence as acceptable.
  • I believe in the Right for Citizens to own and bear arms, for security against any Oligarchy that would choose to take away these rights.
  • I am a commie-pinko, tree-hugging, anarchist, socialism-loving, professional-left ELITIST.
  • There are Damned few of us, and fewer still willing to be Activist Elitists.
  • I refuse to accept the moderate-centrist framing. I will not abdicate my role in pushing the Overton Window further Left.
It has made many bolt for the door.
We need more Damned Elitists, JOIN IN!

DIANE G blogs at The Wild Wild Left.  She also maintains a radio program accessible at blogtalkradio.




Our Friends…

Tearing down the smug rationales for the crimes of our foreign policy

By Diane G

[print_link]
Crosspost with original at The Wild Wild Left 

Sun Feb 13, 2011 at 10:35:07 AM EST

hair peasant day? Do they cover for us when we are cheating on our wives ripping off other Countries? I mean when its gets up to the “special relationship” phase, do we have an “From Here to Eternity” moment in the surf?


Oh, come onnnnn already!

It certainly does not mean the people of one Nation care about the People of another Nation.

Governments create relationships without ever asking the people what WE think, hell they try and prevent us from even getting to KNOW each other.

I know, its so very complex, it must be so complicated my small plebeian brain cannot possibly comprehend it. Its about Allies, Diane. They are our allies.

Go ahead, explain it to me.

Allies for what, for a common goal? Or is it allies against something else? What is that goal and what are we fighting that wants to stop that goal?

You see, if we grow the food and trade the food, thats one thing, but Capitalism is based on growing it cheap, and charging others MORE for it, so that we get free money for our labors, and our ability to dupe people into thinking our food is worth more than what its worth. If Capitalism means Freedom, it means Freedom to be cheating bastards.

Cars never got cheaper, either.

Governments who put their people before their rich are obviously enemies of the Country.

Well, roll me over in the surf baby and lay a big wet sloppy on me!

DIANE G blogs at The Wild Wild Left. Her eye-opening commentary is also heard via blogtalkradio.




10 Historical 'Facts' Only a Right-Winger Could Believe

By Roy Edroso, AlterNet

Posted on February 11, 2011
[print_link]
Originally at http://www.alternet.org/story/149871/

AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it. Get a load, for example, of John Podhoretz explaining how the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani reduced abortions in New York City (though, um, not really) because he cut crime, which is one of “the spiritual causes of abortion.”

Liberal Fascism“; nowadays anytime a conservative talks about, say, Woodrow Wilson or Hillary Clinton, you may expect him to mention their resemblance to Benito Mussolini. They don’t even have to think about it, even when normal people are gaping at them open-mouthed like audience members at “Springtime for Hitler” — it’s part of the folklore that helps them understand the American experience.

The overarching task of the conservative historian is to rehabilitate the image of capitalism, even at its most red-toothed and -clawed. Not a hard job, as both our history and culture ceaselessly celebrate the innovative dynamism of American business.

unseemly wartime speculation, built enormous fortunes on the exceedingly generous terms of the times, which included briberymonopolies, and stock manipulation, perverting the alleged power of the free market on their own behalf. They were kind of like the Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers of their day — except they never got caught.

Thomas E. Woods, Lawrence W. Reed, and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (better known now as a neo-Confederate) look at the robber barons’ dirty records and ask: So what? J.P. Morgan built a nice library!

Brad DeLong has noted, the grotesque inequity in American wealth that characterized their era has only one equivalent in U.S. history — that of our own time. And if one’s business is excusing the perfidy and criminality of today’s speculators and swindlers, it is helpful to make heroes of the speculators and swindlers who are their models.

9. Sputnik bankrupted the Soviet Union.

Sarah Palin. In her Fox News rebuttal to President Obama’s recent State of the Union, Palin said that the Russians’ “victory in that race to space… incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.”

pointed out that Palin’s version of history is confused on many points. But don’t tell that to conservatives. Among them, Palin’s charisma is so overweening that her bizarre POV is yet defended — in some cases, on the grounds that her “larger and more important point about history” was misunderstood (which then mutated into “Palin was right”), and in others just because, as a poster at Lucianne Goldberg’s site put it, “The left will have puppies because of it.”

Jonah Goldberg described as “the government tells the people what to do, and it relies on a handful of experts to get it done according to government specifications.”

Cleon Skousen claimed in the ’50s that the USSR built Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. It kind of figures Palin would follow in that tradition.)

8. Galileo was a conservative.

neocon icon. Now they’re trying to do the same thing with Galileo.

portrayed Galileo’s ordeal as not so bad; why, the Pope didn’t even torture him, he just threatened to, and anyway the Church was only reasonably trying to “prohibit the circulation of writings which were judged harmful.”

Jonathan Weyer and Paul Feyerabend have amplified the theme, but their heady thoughts were brought crashing to earth by National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, who in 1999 attacked the “ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin” on Galileo with easy-reading versions of the Catholic argument. (Dinesh D’Souza provided similar arguments at a slightly higher reading level.)

American Spectator called skeptic Lloyd Keigwin “The Galileo of Global Warming” and claimed he made a giant contribution to discrediting a movement that would impose a deadly energy clamp on the world economy….” More recently the “ClimateGate” scandal prompted a new wave of Galileo reclamation, with Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal lamenting, “The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims… evokes the attempt to silence Galileo.”

Scan the blogs, and you’ll see plenty more of this stuff (e.g. “The Great Global Warming Inquisition“). Next stop: J. Robert Oppenheimer — Victim of a Liberal Conspiracy.

7. The Founding Fathers really tried to end slavery.

worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” The one “founder” Bachmann cited was John Quincy Adams, who was actually the son of the founder John Adams.

Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism, and others.

Fundamentalists, for example, frequently cite the founders’ verbal objections to the practice as the inspiration for abolitionism.

Paul Gottfried, for example, has argued that “Presbyterian theologians spilled rivulets of ink doing what Cicero and Pliny never felt obliged to do, showing how in their society slavery was being elevated to solicitous education for a backward people. The fact that such arguments had to be provided… underscores the perceived need to humanize a ‘peculiar institution.'” So, like very young children in permissive households, the founders’ dim awareness of guilt excuses them from blame.

military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion would have endorsed John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, or that George Washington, who tried to solve his dental challenges by having implanting in his gums teeth extracted from his slaves, was a precocious abolitionist. But when you hang out with people in tricorner hats and knee-breeches who think the Founders were guys just like themselves, it’s a little easier to suspend disbelief.

6. Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist.

Glenn Beck has helped turn that around, lambasting TR at last year’s CPAC and denouncing his words as “a socialist utopia” which “we need to address … as if it is a cancer.”

closely coincided with the socialist conception.” Pestritto was given room to defend his and Beck’s views in the Wall Street Journal. And the Ashbrook Center’s Ken Thomas concluded that Roosevelt “pushed centralization of power far further than circumstances justified.”

qualify their enthusiasm, saying while he went wrong with his statism, he did do some good things, like subjugate foreigners and so forth.

was he a socialist too? Now, instead of sputtering, they can just say yes.

5. Conservatives swept MLK and the Civil Rights movement to victory.

against the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.

defeated the Klansmen of the Democratic Party to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and realize King’s dream.

greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act in both chamber. They generally don’t recall that nearly all the Democratic opponents were Southern, nor that President Lyndon Johnson, who had pushed for the Act, reflected afterward that the Democrats had “lost the South for a generation” — which turned out to be accurate, plus a decade or two, as Southerners abandoned the Democrats in consequence of their race-mixing ways.

criticism of the Civil Rights Act), conservatives will claim King and civil rights for themselves, and react to the continuing, massive disposition of black Americans to vote Democratic as an act of stunning ingratitude.

4. Margaret Sanger was all about the eugenics.

Reader’s Digest founder DeWitt Wallace — and followers of the pseudoscience of eugenics. This last was an unfortunate choice, to put it mildly, as eugenicists championed forced sterilization and even managed to get laws passed mandating it in some states.

hook for spreading the word about contraception, rather than the other way around; preventing unwanted pregnancy was her life’s work. Still, it’s a fair cop, and her eugenics endorsements — like H.L. Mencken’s anti-Semitic remarks and Robert Byrd’s Klan membership — are a dark spot on an otherwise admirable reputation.

as if it were still a popular movement, they usually don’t condemn the prominent churchmen and scientists who supported it, not the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, nor Charles Lindbergh, nor Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, et al. It’s always Sanger who symbolizes it — which is rather like portraying Ezra Pound as the head of the Third Reich. Not only lowly lunatic fringe figures, but also big-time wingnuts like Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin take this approach.

Lila Rose Planned Parenthood sting reminds us, conservatives aren’t just against abortion — they’re against anyone who offers women any alternative to childbearing whatsoever. By portraying America’s First Lady of Contraception as an enemy of freedom, they may hope to mask their their own authoritarian ambitions.

3. Women were better off before they got the vote.

rather defensively insist that “conservatives and libertarians played central roles in drafting and ratifying” the 19th Amendment, so there. Others, like National Review‘s John DerbyshireAnn Coulter and the editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, affect to be against women’s suffrage, either in clumsy emulation of H.L. Mencken’s playful remarks on the subject, or because they’re assholes.

Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation asserted that Americans were freer in the 1880s than they are today. When called on it, Hornberger said okay, maybe black people and women weren’t so free. But this prompted George Mason professor Bryan Caplan to ask, “In what ways, then, were American women in 1880 less free than men?” Their lack of franchise, sexual autonomy, etc. struck Caplan as irrelevant: Such women lived in an era before gun control of the Department of Education, so, he judged, they were by definition more free than now.

ran against Caplan, but he had his high-profile defenders. At the AtlanticMegan McArdle said, “The overwhelming majority of women in 1880 would be positively horrified by the prospect of living my life. Not only is it flagrantly immoral, it violates much of what they themselves thought of as the core of womanhood. Should we get excited about women being denied the right to go to medical school, who did not want to go to medical school?” We may imagine 19th-century women who did not want to go to medical school raising their fists in approval.

Concerned Women for America celebrated the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment thus: “Women Won the Right to Vote 90 Years Ago; Conservative Women Still Fighting the Media for a ‘Place at the Table.'” “90 years after the 19th Amendment,” wrote Lori Zingaro at RedState, “Democrats are actively seeking to figuratively repeal the amendment” — that is, by promoting “the myth of a wage gap” between men and women and disapproving of Sarah Palin. Thus, she said, Democrats “are striving for a form of reverse-suffrage, wherein every woman must walk in lockstep with their ideology, or you are not a ‘real’ woman.”

2. Darwin is a menace to Western Civilization.

cool with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But they’re usually discussing the science of evolution — and on that score, they still can’t bring a majority of Republicans onto their side.

have long believed and still believe that, in the words of Center for a Just Society Chairman Ken Connor, Darwin would have us believe that “God is simply a creature of our imagination. Human beings emerged gratuitously from the primordial ooze. Since we are the product of mere chance, we have no inherent dignity, value or worth.” And that just ain’t right.

How the Cambrian Fossil Record Disproves Darwin, and so on.

Dinesh D’Souza noted that, while “evolution does seem to turn many Christians into unbelievers,” the discovery of evolutionary principles didn’t sour Darwin himself on God — Darwin’s own bitterness over the death of his child did that; and when the evil Thomas Huxley later tied evolution to atheism, the embittered atheist Darwin supported him by becoming “increasingly insistent that evolution was an entirely naturalistic system, having no room for miracles or divine intervention at any point.” If Darwin had been in his right mind, of course, he’d be singing Glory Hallelujah.

Peter Lawler made a noble effort, writing that as Darwinism shows that “our happiness comes from doing our duty to the species as social mammals. .. this account of who we are is basically conservative. It promotes family values—including such insights as people who come from large families are generally happier….”

Jonah Goldberg iced the cake with his statement that while “I disagree with those who would lump Darwin with Freud and Marx… I don’t think one can glibly say that just because the book was scientifically correct (speaking broadly, we’ve discovered lots of new things since then) and pioneering, doesn’t mean it can’t also be harmful. Darwinism certainly led to many horrors and abuses across the ideological spectrum….”

goes way back and, despite the efforts of some pointy-heads, conservatives aren’t backing off it anytime soon.

America’s prominent historians, you will hear nothing but good from them about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who shepherded America through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

went to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt, and FDR welcomed their hatred. For some years they were obliged to keep their anger at FDR on the down-low — after all, wasn’t Reagan a Roosevelt fan? Plus there were many more people then than now who actually remembered that presidency, and it didn’t play well to contradict their memories.

The American Conservative. “The New Deal was harmful medicine for a struggling economy,” claims The American Spectator. “Faced with a similar crisis, there cannot be more than one in a hundred who would now recommend FDR’s specific curatives” — at least, not among the hundred the Spectator would ask.

right-wing factotum Amity Shlaes called The Forgotten Man, all about how FDR prolonged the Depression, has gained a place of honor on conservative bookshelves. As you may imagine, the Wall Street Journal reviewer loved it — “Ms. Shlaes rightly reminds us,” he wrote, “of the harmful effect of Rooseveltian activism and class-warfare rhetoric.” The reviewer did mention that “one question that Ms. Shlaes never quite answers is just what Roosevelt should have done to beat the Depression beyond practicing a Coolidge-like passivity.” But no true conservative would need to ask such a question: Of course FDR should have done as Tea Partiers counsel be done for our current depression: Cut the deficit and screw the poor.

criticized by John Updike (what does he know about books? Or the Depression? Oh, he lived through it? Well, what does he know about books?) Ross Douthat leapt to condemn Updike’s “solipsistic flapdoodle”: “FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action” that Updike’s dad admired, said Douthat, “and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business.”

always eager to explain how FDR’s disastrous presidency — to which the American people, for reasons unknown, returned him for four terms — is an ominous warning for the allegedly similarly socialistic Obama.

Roy Edroso is proprietor of Alicublog.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.